


Melted into Memory

by Budinca



Category: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Gen, Poetry, Post-Despair
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-23
Updated: 2014-09-07
Packaged: 2018-02-10 02:25:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2007492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Budinca/pseuds/Budinca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It still hurts in the morning, before she connects to Komaeda, and the wave of warmth that floods her when she sees him smiling at her takes her aback. For a frantic moment, she thinks <i>this is not my feeling</i>, but it’s one of the best she’s felt so far and she find herself reluctant to let it go. Not that she has any say in the matter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I thought I might as well start posting this and be done with these guys who have plagued me for months.  
> Do enjoy if you can, and thanks.

_It went wrong_ , was the first thing she thought once she saw them. That was probably the saddest thing ever.

Many of them were asleep, or pretending to be asleep, or wishing to be asleep, and some were in a state of constant agitation, of fretting and wandering, of biting nails and drumming fingers. Few of them paid attention, at least for the first few days. Then, Nanami decided to make herself heard.

In the end, it was easier to talk to them than she’d thought.

 

It could’ve been said that she was helping herself too, this way. In fact, she really was, that being one of the reasons she was there in the first place. It was harder now, to only realise that she’d forgotten things because she heard them spoken to her. It was scary, how ignorant she’d been of her own state of mind.

 

They were talking to her and she was growing, more and more, back towards what she once was. What she thought she’d been. She also learnt so many new things. Nanami would’ve never guessed how many types of rabbits there were if not for listening to Tanaka’s long, anxious explanations as he struggled to eat in between words. She wouldn’t have known all about coaches if not for Nidai and Owari’s bedtime stories (they always talked to her late in the night, maybe because they had the most problems sleeping). She would’ve been ignorant of the intimacies requested by cross-country affairs were it not for Sonia’s speeches as she embroidered canvas late in the morning. She had known a lot about all of them before meeting them, and she could still find so much to learn.

It was, in consequence, an indulgence on her part to spend almost all of her afternoons with Hinata. She could’ve easily detached herself and attended to her other duties too, but she somehow always chose not to. Maybe it was because the first, biggest part of her life she’d spent impersonating a human being that she was so set upon these odd ways now.

Hinata was calmer now; somewhat kinder. Just as Nanami would think this (a flashback of connections), he would blow up in a torrent of emotions that had never crossed his face before, a whirlwind of rage and grief and pain which, as much as she tried to be human about it, fascinated her, and added still more to her being. All in all, Hinata was still himself, only with two sides of him split and trying aggressively to blend together again. He screamed once to be gentle for a day. He had to be cruel to be kind.

 

“I sometimes think that this was a bad idea,” Hinata tells her one late afternoon, legs crossed on the bed and his chin pressed on his right hand.

Nanami imagines herself on the floor in front of him, back leaned against the cold white wall. “...Why?”

He’s drumming a rhythm on his thigh and, as she observes it involuntarily, Nanami finds it almost familiar. “I don’t know...” But he does, and she knows. “It’s just this whole facility, it’s so _austere_ –” That’s not one of his words. “—it makes it kind of hard to get over it? Does it make sense?” he lifts his chin a little, looking at her for confirmation.

Nanami nods; it does, but not only because of what he’d said. _“It keeps us locked in secluded rooms with only our thoughts to fester in,”_ Komaeda had told her two nights before; he had been in a particularly talkative mood. “It’s not for much longer, I’m told...” Nanami tells Hinata this time, and his eyes seem restless as he looks almost through her.

“Yeah, I hope not...” he tries for a laugh, averting his gaze now. His hand is still drumming the same tune, fast and erratic.

 

When she’s allowed to connect to his screen, she finds Komaeda pacing across the room with a book. He has personally asked to be given a few volumes along these past weeks of semi-solitary confinement, probably the only one of them who bothered to think of requesting anything. It occurs to Nanami that he must have done so because of his reluctance to come into contact with the others. It’s not really her thought, and she can’t place it.

Komaeda glances at her with eyes lit up by unanticipated bliss, as if he’s just seen a childhood friend again. She knows it’s only a fleeting sentiment, but she can’t help but feel a little happy too. That’s good, she’s feared for her emotions while she was being reactivated.

“You’re early today,” he says, gratefully. “Look, I found something earlier,” he turns from her to his book and changes his tone so abruptly she feels her circuits getting ahead of her own perception. “ _Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas._ ” If possible, she would have been almost distracted. “It means _fortunate who was able to know the causes of things,_ ” Komaeda goes back to his own delusion of a carefree tone and smiles at her.

“That’s unusual...” she imagines leaning her head to the side.

For him, an instant reaction. “Oh? Am I wrong?”

She has learnt that the more emotions he displays, the more he hides himself. That was partly the doctors, partly herself, partly Hinata’s look of concern whenever this happened around him. “I meant the Latin.”

Surely, he checks himself. “Ah, that. No, that’s not all of it. Can I read it to you?” It would be a first time, and she’s always in need of more learning.

Besides, through some means his voice has started resonating in unknown lovely tones in her mind. He reads to her in English, and that still doesn’t change, and she revels in the feel of rhythm his intonation offers her. It occurs to Nanami she has yet to acquire some poetic library; one comes so hard by those now that the world is in ruins.

“Byron,” Komaeda explains as he finishes with another easy smile, which she returns. “Just a little something to relieve this grotesquely _austere_ atmosphere.”

She knew she had heard that word before. It keeps the smile on her face, for a moment. “Do you also think this is a bad idea?” she asks out of dim curiosity.

Komaeda looks at her with wide eyes, then sighs noncommittally and drops on his bed. “I don’t think... I’m in the right state of mind to give my opinion on that.”

“Hinata seemed to think so, though,” Nanami pursues, if only because she doesn’t like feeling so far away from the people she’s speaking with.

With a light chuckle, he gives her an enigmatic grin. “Hinata is... quite ahead of me in a lot of aspects.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a tiny bit of Hamlet on Hinata's part at the very beginning.  
> Komaeda's pompous Latin comes from Virgil qtd. in Lord Byron's poem, "They Say that Hope is Happiness", of which you will hear more as the story develops. The story's arguably less pompous title comes from the same poem.


	2. Chapter 2

It has been harder for Souda to find something to do, given the fact that the Foundation has a strict list of items they can not be allowed to posses, but Nanami has bet on Lego blocks and she has been right. Right before lunch, when she usually connects to his room for half an hour, she sees a quite impressive construction dominating the desk. Every day it gets bigger or broader, and Souda talks to her about what he says is nothing at all. She finds out that he has quite an affinity for dogs, although he never had one for more than two weeks, and also that he used to try very hard in elementary school, although it all collapsed once he found a hobby at his father’s garage.

During the lunch hours, they can go to the dining room and sit there all together. There is no rule that forbids them from leaving their rooms at any other time except from 9.00 at night and 6.00 in the morning, but Nanami observed that none of them were that keen on interacting nowadays. Not face to face, at least.

Their single rooms contain a simple, but dependable calling system, to which Nanami is not connected, although that speaker and her screen are mere inches apart. From what the others have told her, some of them choose to speak with each other through that medium, rather late at night. After all, that’s how she was subjected to Owari and Nidai’s bedtime stories. 

She doesn’t ask, otherwise, if she’s not told, feeling that their privacy is already way too limited. In her programmes, she has particular timetables showing when and where and in what circumstances she’s wanted. It took her a while to gather all that information, but it was all worth it if it prevented her intruding in their lives.

Koizumi is not keen on speaking to anybody, and Nanami only spends the required 5 minutes with her every other day, but when she does, she sees her looking at pictures, at photos given to her on request. At one point, Koizumi told her that half of them she doesn’t remember taking. Their memory was not all there yet, after all. Nanami has never seen those photographs, but she is aware of their residence on the wall opposite Koizumi’s bed. She wished the rooms were not quite so dimly lit; that might have lifted their spirits from their constant mist.

 

After 9 o’clock, she turns, if just a little apprehensively, to Hinata. In the afternoon, he had not been particularly talkative, but they usually talk two to three times a day, so she feels it safe to check. He looks at her as if in surprise, and puts his book aside. He has a _book_ now, and Nanami double-checks to see if it hadn’t just escaped her vision before.

“Shall I go?” she asks as he gets up from the bed.

Hinata looks at her with furrowed brows of incredulity. “What? No, of course not,” he takes his usual place, still on the bed, but closer to her. “Are you done with your nightly visits?”

She hasn’t really checked on Komaeda yet, but she’s not going to, either. His are the mornings or the nights when he cares to request them. At some point, Nanami had caught herself apologizing to Hinata on those latter occasions. Even from early on, seeing the two of them at such short intervals from each other unsettled her, and the human habits in her made her avoid it instead of trying to understand it.

“Yes, today was easy,” she says by means of closing the subject. “Are you reading something, Hinata?”

He makes a face that displays in equal quantities uncertainty and embarrassment. “Thinking about it.”

As luck would have it, she takes the hint not to push it. “I talked to Naegi today.”

“Did you, now?” Hinata’s tone comes probably more indifferent than he intended, if the hurried attempt to make it better with a forced smile is anything to go by. “What did he say?”

“A month, at best,” and she would have sighed if she needed to breathe. Hinata, in turn, just lets himself fall back on the sheets.

“And at worst?” he asks at length, looking blankly at the white ceiling of his room.

Nanami smiles, only because she knows he can’t see her at the moment, and thinks that she will always prefer this kind of childish behaviour instead of the sombre one, no matter how big of a lie it is. “Next summer.” There is a pause of inactivity before she explains herself. “We’re in February.”

“Oh.” He rights himself up and stares at her in hesitation before forming the question. “And when the decision comes, we’re all going, right? All of us. At the same time. In the same place. Nobody will be left behind, right?”

Nanami blinks at his crudely masked distress. “Who are you thinking about, Hinata?” She asks, because no matter what she’s not human enough to realise she’s being cruel.

“I –” he stumbles over his own unformed words and involuntarily looks elsewhere. “I don’t know, the ones of us who are in worse shape, I guess? L-like, Tsumiki is still recovering after her wounds, and Nidai’s hands are still in plaster, and Sayonji still has trouble walking...”

He doesn’t mention, doesn’t even seem to be aware of the bandages on his forehead, or the fact that he has to apply drops every day to be able to stand even the dim light in this building. He doesn’t go as far as to bring about the absurd amount of pills they all have to consume daily just to keep marginally functioning. Nanami feels something go very wrong in her as she sees how much the weight of worry and guilt presses on his shoulders. She didn’t know she could be quite so sad.

“Everybody will be very careful,” she says in a small voice, knowing that it doesn’t reach him. “Would it be better to stay here and wait until everyone is able to go than to wait for them there?”

“Yes,” he responds immediately, hands fretting ceaselessly in his lap and eyes still averted from hers.

He must know, she thinks, that there’s nothing he can do either way, that his responsibility is ill-placed, taking into account his own state, and that nobody is expecting anything from him as much as he is from himself, but he doesn’t give in. Nanami wonders if he knows how many emotions he’s given her, and how many of them are of sorrow.

It’s taken her a while to realise that what she at first called pain was sometimes deeply-buried affection. But then again, that changed nothing.

“I think the others will prefer it this way too,” Nanami used her words as a press on his shoulder. He doesn’t respond, for the moment. “Hinata?”

“Yeah... I just remembered something,” he smiles at the hands in his lap and she feels her mind blink in surprise. “ _My former thoughts returned; the fear that kills;/ And hope that is unwilling to be fed;_ ” Hinata recites, and although he doesn’t have the same cadence and sureness as Komaeda did, Nanami still feels herself, sillily, enthralled. It takes a few moments for his breathing to break into a mournful chuckle. “Sorry... I’ve seen it somewhere, I think,” he touched the bandages on one of his temples almost unconsciously, “It seems that I can’t even help memorising stuff nowadays...” he breathes. “Sorry. Good night.”

She nods and tries to leave the aching feeling poking at her mind unclassified, although it’s not new by far. “Good night.”

 

It still hurts in the morning, before she connects to Komaeda, and the wave of warmth that floods her when she sees him smiling at her takes her aback. For a frantic moment, she thinks _this is not my feeling_ , but it’s one of the best she’s felt so far and she finds herself reluctant to let it go. Not that she has any say in the matter.

“Good morning, Nanami,” he greets her by way of raising his fingers from the book currently propped on his legs. It’s a different book and it’s so early.

“...Morning,” she imagines herself sighing again, and a look around the room tells her that if she had a body she would have wasted no two moments before shuffling under the blanket on his unmade bed and stayed there in the fading warmth of his body for a long, long time. She thinks of how unusual it is that she’s tired.

Komaeda’s smile drops after the first few seconds and he looks at her as if she’s a real, breathing entity beside him, instead of an image on a screen. “Is something wrong?” He’s right, too.

“Lost in thought,” she says and it wasn’t her custom to hide her feelings before she had so many. “Another book?” she finds that she can still yawn if she concentrates hard enough.

For all her effort, Komaeda watches her with mild amusement. “Yes. Listen: _here the truceless armies yet/ trample, rolled in blood and sweat;/ they kill and kill and never die;/ and I think that each is I._ ”

“That’s nice,” she says vacantly and he laughs.

“How are you?” Komaeda turns towards her from where he was leant back on the wall beside his bed and she wonders if he’s not cold, in just a thin T-shirt and cotton trousers, all too large on him. If she were to close her eyes and only listen to his voice, apart from the rather frequent pauses for breath, she would believe him completely healthy. For all it’s worth, he certainly makes an effort to seem so.

“I was thinking of sharing some movies today,” she admits and runs her mind over the chosen titles. After yesterday, she thought that something to take their minds off things would be welcome. It truly is a horrible hospital atmosphere they’re in, after all. “Everything’s okay.”

“It’s nice of you to say that,” Komaeda seems to fall more into melancholy, fingers absently playing with the bandages on his left arm. “Movies are good, too. I think some of us will really appreciate it, Nanami.” She doesn’t know, still, if that includes him. “When I was little I used to love _The Little Mermaid_ , you know. I would watch it during breakfast and then replay it after I did the dishes and I think even my dog got to learn the songs by heart,” he laughs again, only for a moment, and seems lost in thought again. “It started to seem very unhealthy as I grew up and now I hate it.”

She instantly deletes the file out of her folder. “...What was its name?” He blinks at her. “Your dog’s.”

“Ah,” he breathes and seems unable to stifle a self-deprecating chuckle. “Lucky.” Nanami watches for the short while it takes him to keep his shaky smile in check. “Died in a car accident. Next day I got accepted into the middle school I wanted to go to. Funny, isn’t it.”

Verbal squeezes of hands and pats on the shoulder don’t work with Komaeda. Nanami guesses that physical ones wouldn’t work either, but she still longs for the chance to try. “...I don’t think it was your fault.”

The sigh he lets out after her words is breathier, somehow. “That would be nice to think. Sorry, I got caught up talking about myself.”

“I don’t mind.” She looks around her mind. “Do you like _Atlantis_?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hinata's memorised verses are from William Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence", which will make a valiant return later on too.  
> Komaeda's bad joke of nice words comes from A. E. Housman's "The Welsh Marches", which otherwise is a really nice poem.


	3. Chapter 3

It is unclear what exactly happened to Sayonji’s legs, but their doctors have advised her not to put too much pressure on them if she can help it. For all it’s worth, she didn’t really blow up in their faces, but that might have been the meds. Nanami talks to her after lunch on certain days, and she was at first surprised to see that she was wanted as a conversation partner. Sayonji, being more or less enfolded in a dozen blankets anytime she’s not outside her room, puts all her pent-up energy in describing her achievements as a child. Nanami didn’t expect to ever have this much information on dancing contests for toddlers. Most of the time, they play, the screen being big enough for two players. Nanami also didn’t expect to find such a worthy, bloodlusty rival.

Mioda’s eyes lit up when Nanami first visited her, and started begging her loudly for various sorts of albums and songs. Since CDs are some of the interdicted items on the Foundation’s list, Nanami is her only available music player, and this is how she spends most of her visits. Mioda’s hair is longer now, and there are healed scars on her neck and palms, but she rarely shows any change. Nanami fears that, in the case of a breakdown, she’ll have no means of helping her.

She has this fear for everyone, in fact. Naegi had tried to tell her that she wasn’t put there as a caretaker, but more as someone needing help too. Nanami, feeling no wounds inside her aside from her vague gaps in memory, finds it hard to believe that. She can’t help but feel that, as she failed to keep them safe one time, she should keep that responsibility now. It is a hard thing to do when one has the ability to get so close to others as she does. It is a hard thing to do when she is reconstructing herself through the voices of wonderful, but broken people. 

 

“What are you doing?”she tests the new codes she’s written, which allow her to blink, in a way.

Hinata is not pacing the room like he used to, nowadays. He also seems, at least to Nanami, less prone to sudden outbursts, but a weird sensation, a connection that has been made on too distant a plane for her to observe immediately, tells her that not everything is healed yet, and also that the breakdowns haven’t entirely stopped either.

Hinata, however, looks at her from his bed and his red eyes seem clearer than they’ve been in a long while. “Nothing much.” That sums it up pretty evenly. “You?” he adds almost carelessly, turning another page in his current book.

“Catching up...,” she looks at the walls again, in order to create a pause. “There are quite a few online games I haven’t yet been introduced to,” she explains.

He makes a few friendly comments from what he remembers playing before she was even created, and Nanami smiles. Simply, unconsciously, feeling glad to be taken in by the cadence of his voice while laying her programmes at rest for a short while. She almost makes herself believe she does that, before the impossibility of it kicks back in her mind as a hard fact. She was somebody else again, for a moment, and the conscience of it makes her want to cry and smile at the same time. It’s painful, but even that feels like a shared emotion.

“...say something from what you’re reading,” she asks selfishly, for the want is not only her own, while the possibility of listening is solely hers.

Hinata is not easily surprised these days, a side-effect of tiredness, but his eyebrows do raise the slightest bit, receding into his slightly overgrown fringe. He doesnt make another comment, but when he does read, it sounds slightly choked-up. “ _By our spirits are we deified:/ We poets in our youth begin in gladness;/ But thereof come in the end despondency and madness._ ” He smiles helplessly at her. “I found it, the one I told you about before...”

Nanami blinks. “Do you really think this was such a bad idea, Hinata?”

His hands are trembling on his book, she has just realised that. “W-what do you mean?”

“That you’re not going to get better,” she clarifies before dropping her gaze. She hadn’t meant to be unkind. Like most things nowadays, it just flowed out. She is overfull.

Her pause gives Hinata the occasion to change his position, from the loosely relaxed one into something more drawn into itself. “I never said that...” He’s not looking at her.

Nanami persists. “You must not lose hope...that you’re all going to be alright one day.”

At this, Hinata smiles thinly. “...they say that hope is happiness,” he whispers.

 

Naegi has asked her to tell everyone about the future plans, so she could not exactly ignore it, but it is a fact that Nanami had changed her schedule prior to her individual announcements. A breakfast notice would have counted as doing her job too, maybe, but she really doesn’t see the point of running away when she is basically part of a stationary computer. If anything, she likes to think that she has a better sense of responsibility now.

It’s late at night when she hesitates for the third time to connect to Komaeda, but chooses to do it before she could change her mind and ask a non-sentient programme to push her into it. It helps that she’s got used to the wave of imaginary electrostatic that hits her everytime she sees him. It’s different, and slightly worse, than what Hinata does to her.

The first lines of small talk pass almost without her notice, which would alarm her as a dominace of automatism if she weren’t so caught up in anxiety about what was to come. Imagining herself very small, or at least less visible (the light of her screen maybe dimmed), Nanami searches his face: “I think...we thought...you can be transfered next month.”

Eyes slightly dull in the dimmness of his room, Komaeda blinks at her, not so much in surprise, as in calm resignation. “Are you only talking about me?”

Nanami lets a moment pass, vaguely lost as she keeps looking straight at him. She remembers now, all too clearly, the look of acquiescence he always bore whenever talking about himself. “No, all of you,” she lets out afterwards, even the milliard of secondary programmes finding it impossible not to make her voice quiver. Human habits.

“Where are we supposed to go?” he drops his gaze and his voice, hand pulling unconsciously at his bandages.

“Some other place. Less...austere. Not a hospital, a house. More...homelike.” That was something Naegi had said. What is having a home like, anyway? Nanami will probably never know.

Komaeda lets out a breath. “Ah, I see.” He stops moving his hand too. Looking at him now, quiet and tired, Nanami thinks of covering him in something warmer, something thick and warm and strong enough to keep his body together. That, she muses, would be as much a homelike feeling as she could ever get. “I rather thought...I would stay here.”

She knew. Hinata knew. Still, it feels just as bad to hear it out loud. “...Do you want to stay here?” She knows the answer to that too, and she also knows the answer he wants to give.

Staring at the floor, he looks on the verge of giving the latter, only to be stopped by his lower lip trembling. It takes a while, but in the end he shakes his head. He’s unravelled most of his bandage by now.

If she could, Nanami would take a deep breath. “There are people...who wouldn’t want to go without you.”

“We are not renowned for knowing what’s best for us,” Komaeda tries to joke, choking down a remorseful laugh.

“That applies to you too,” she retorts, almost indignant. She waits another moment in his silence. “It’s not a bad thing to try and take the less painful path.”

“Of course,” he says, and looks up at her, with a smile sadder than tears. “In my life, you see, there was always something unaccounted for. I could not get myself out of the Slough of Despond.”

“ _Fortunate who was able to know the causes of things_...was it?” she cocks her head, hiding her relief at seeing him widen his eyes at her. “Sometimes the only thing you can do is hope for the best and wait for it to come.” Truly, she hadn’t known how much Naegi had influenced her.

Komaeda has always been the kind of person who has the ability to be either very charming or very creepy when grinning. This time, it is a little bit of both. He is a dentist’s wildest dream. Nanami blinks at herself. “Hope is a really cruel thing, Nanami,” he says with the appearance of calm contentment, “It’s the most laborious thing there is, holding on to it, especially when it has failed you a lot of times. You realise, you will never be able to get over a hard situation if you don’t at the same time give up on the hope that it will get better. It’s funny, it’s just like a parasite, leeching onto your suffering, but it seems so beautiful that you just can’t make yourself look away from it. Like mistletoe,” he sighs. “Torturing hope, never letting you get complacent in despair, you’d say. You wouldn’t have to suffer if you just didn’t know there was some better delusion waiting for you in a future that would never be. Really, Nanami, the only hopes I can think gladly of are the ones I had in the past.” His smile is like the trembling needle of an earthquake machine. “Do you remember that?”

“I do,” she says, and if she were flesh-and-bone she would hide herself behind her knees, the déjà-vus giving her vertigo.

He takes a shaky breath and Nanami imagines her human form mouthing the words along with him. “ _And all that mem’ry loves the most/ Was once our only hope to be:/ And all that hope adored and lost/ Hath melted into memory._ ”

This time only, Nanami really wishes she never felt a thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hinata happily quotes Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence" again, only to shamelessly mention Byron later.  
> Komaeda makes a reference to John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim Progress", thinks himself a Robert Walton, and then goes all out on Byron's "They Say that Hope is Happiness".  
> 


	4. Chapter 4

They only have one more month, maybe less, maybe more, and Nanami distracts herself by doing as many things as she can simultaneously in order not to dwell too much on it. It’s never been a secret to her that she won’t be able to follow them where they go. Naegi had assured her that it was only temporary, that as soon as she’s all better there would be no fear of logging her in to another system, but her programmes were too smart not to show how much of a risk that would be at the moment. She thinks loud enough to be able to hear herself, now that she won’t be there they will have no option but to talk between themselves. That is a good thing.

Tsumiki is, finally, much better, even Hinata admitted that. Nanami visits her and feels relief as she sees the other uses only light bandages on her wounds now. Tsumiki has told her that she likes talking to her, now that she can, because Nanami is very calm and because she cannot touch her. Nanami has been with them long enough to take all of that as a compliment. Still, it isn’t all okay. She wants to touch someone too.

Kuzuryuu and Pekoyama are probably the ones who talk to each other the most, and it makes Nanami very proud and very thankful. She can only hope, for now, that they would open up towards the others too. She hopes for a lot of things, primarily that when (or if) she’ll see them all again, they will be the friends she and Monomi always wanted them to be.

Within two weeks, Hanamura teaches her most of the recipes he’s learnt from his mother, with overly dramatic and passionate flourishings. Nanami uses a moment to ask Hinata if roast duck with orange slices is actually edible for everyone. He looks at her weird, and she wonders if it’s because the question is weird or because it’s the fifth time she contacts him that day. Thankfully, he doesn’t ask. She’s apprehensive of learning the truth too.

Of course, there is no way to evade a question once you’ve thought of it, especially when one is a computer. On her part, Nanami does her best to ignore the answer.

That is, until it’s too late and there is nothing else to do than decode Pac-Man and wait for the others to wake up.

She hasn’t tried putting herself in Sleep Mode yet, although she’s been great at it before. Somehow, the human fear of falling asleep and never waking up has crept inside her memory. She hasn’t been aware of it at first, when there was so much to learn, so much information to classify in incomplete folders, but now she is better, now everything works smoother. Now she has time to think. She doesn’t want to fall asleep without saying goodbye, and she doesn’t want to risk never seeing anyone again.

Now she has time to think, and she realises that, together with all the knowledge she’s been given, there was a constant feeling that every single one of them felt, one that was so common, so finite, so clear for them, that she didn’t even realise she had it too until now.

Suddenly, she was very, very afraid of being left all alone.

 

Hinata’s hands are shaking, and by the look on his face, he is making a lot of effort to ignore them. “This is ridiculous, what am I even supposed to pack?” he frowns at the small bag open on his bed and then scans his surroundings.

“Clothes?” Nanami offers and Hinata spreads his arms and looks at her wide-eyed, showing the only pair of trousers and shirt he owns, all the rest having been lent to him by the Foundation. “Books?” she shrugs.

Hinata looks over his shoulder at the five or six volumes laying on his bedside table. He bites his lips and his brow creases before turning his face to his bag again. “No, they’re from Komaeda, and I guess he has to give them back to someone too...”

“Is that so...” Nanami looks at his downturned face expectantly and, sure enough, Hinata peeks at her a moment later.

“Please don’t metion it,” he says and keeps rearranging the few pill bottles and pairs of socks he’s been putting in the bag for two hours. _I don’t need to_ , Nanami thinks. _I feel that too._ “This is a bad idea,” the thoughts of an earlier day are repeated, with less ardour and more compliance.

“What is a good idea?” Nanami wonders, tilting her head to the side. She feels like they’ve had this conversation a million time, which might just be true, but she’s not as impatient as she is curious. Curious, because she doesn’t know the answer herself, because she knows that Hinata might at any time find the perfect solution, if only he had a dram of self-confidence left in him.

“How should I know?” he doesn’t quite snap, and drops the pill-bottles back in the bag. “There are no right turns to take in this world anymore, I feel like it’s collapsing on itself,” he gets up and takes mechanically the books from the bedside table and moves to throw them, too, in the bag. It takes a few minutes of fumbling for him to realise he’s not to put them there, and he exhales spasmodically a few times as he takes them out. “I shouldn’t be like this anymore there, I should be more self-posessed already, but I’m not...I feel like I’m not...,” he falters and Nanami watches as he holds involuntarily a few poetry volumes close to his chest, fingers playing with the edges. “I’m not capable of doing anything.”

Nanami examines the decrescendo of his tone. She doesn’t say _You’re capable of doing so many things, you’ve saved yourself and so many other people so far._ She doesn’t say _You’re able to care for someone so deeply that I fell in love through you._ Instead, she says “Talk to everyone, Hinata,” smiling at his hesitant eyes. “Talk and they’ll respond, with time,” she gives her own advice, when this all started.

Hinata’s eyes are on the books in his lap, watching his own fingers move over their covers. “I tried. Well, I’m still trying,” he lets a small smile form on his lips and Nanami makes-belief of huffing triumphantly.

 

“Say, how long have we been in here?” Komaeda asks her not too much later, casually, without even stopping his game of throwing a small red ball in the air above him and catching it again before it hits his face.

Nanami stopped wondering where he got it, and opted instead for making a make-shift pixelated model for herself and joining him in the activity. “Two years,” she answers, catching the virtual ball just as he throws his real-life one. It takes her a while to realise just how long that means, and she glances at him, but he shows no worry.

“So I should be...,” he squints at the ceiling, and she sees his lips moving soundlessly. “Twenty-one? Twenty-two?” he presses his lips closely together and frowns. “I don’t feel that old.” Nanami shrugs and keeps throwing her ball. “It’s weird,” he adds, and she doesn’t react, thinking he’s only musing harmlessly. That is, until he continues. “I shouldn’t have lived this long,” and Nanami’s eyes snap to him, still failing to see any change in emotion on his face. This time, he catches her eye. “What? It’s only what the doctors told me; I was not to live past 19.”

And Nanami thinks, _Must you always make such a harsh use of words_ , grimacing and mechanically throwing her ball in the air again. Then her face cools again, an array of calm pixels. “I think it’s safe to say you’ve received treatment across the years,” she muses, “even if you don’t remember it.”

“Hmm,” Komaeda offers noncommittally, pressing his lips together. “I guess I should be, since I’m still alive, but I don’t feel particularly healthier than before.” When he throws it, the ball almost reaches the ceiling. “...or saner. Breathing’s better, though.”

Nanami doesn’t know what to say, so she simply states “You look better,” although he doesn’t, not really.

He looks frailer, greyer, and almost as if he’s putting a lot of effort into not crumbling to dust. But all these look normal, treatable, not like his precedent euphoria, when he seemed to always have a fever and barely able to breathe because of all the words he couldn’t wait to spill out.

It’s the difference between a cold and hysterics. Nanami thinks he’s safer now, more than he’s ever been.

“Thank you,” Komaeda smiles as if he’d rather not, and squeezes the red ball in his hand.


End file.
